A street last month in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district, one of the city’s top tourist draws, where the sexuality of young girls is on prominent display.

Chris Mcgrath / Getty Images

By MARTIN FACKLER

June 18, 2014

TOKYO — Yielding to years of pressure to fall in line with the rest of the developed world, Japan’s Parliament outlawed the possession of child pornography on Wednesday. But the new law left untouched the nation’s popular and sometimes sexually explicit manga comics as well as other portrayals of young girls as objects of sexual desire.

By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers from the governing and opposition parties joined to pass the legislation to close a loophole in a 1999 law that had banned the production and distribution of child pornography. While the older law did remove much child pornography from public view, critics including prominent conservative politicians have lamented that Japan was the only member of groups of developed nations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., that still allowed its possession.

The exemption in the new law for the popular comics, and also of Japan’s “anime” animated cartoons, was a concession to the nation’s powerful publishing and entertainment industries. It also leaves untouched a vast gray area in which young girls are depicted in sexually suggestive ways. This includes everything from images of the all-girl bands of Japanese pop music posing in lingerie and bikinis, to fantasy illustrations with the faces of prepubescent girls atop the scantily clad bodies of voluptuous adults.

Such images attest to Japan’s more casual social attitudes when it comes to the sexual objectification of women of all ages, and also toward the consumption of pornography itself. (Reflecting those attitudes, the passage of the law barely merited a mention on the nightly news.)

Manga comics with graphic illustrations of sex are sold in neighborhood convenience stores and on train station platforms, and until the proliferation of smartphones, it was common to see men openly reading the comics and magazines featuring nude women while commuting to work.

The fascination with the sexuality of young girls even has its own name in Japanese, “rorikon” — which stands for the “Lolita complex” — and is on prominent display in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district, one of the city’s top tourist draws. Foreign visitors and locals can be seen there ogling explicit manga-derived posters, shirts and even small plastic dolls of young girls with highly exaggerated hourglass figures. The new law on child pornography is partly the result of a push by the Japanese police, who said that the failure to outlaw possession in the 1999 law had created enough continuing demand that the number of criminal cases involving the production and circulation of child pornography skyrocketed. That number jumped tenfold since 2000, to 1,644 cases last year, according to the National Police Agency.

The police efforts on legislation had been blocked, however, by the nation’s publishing houses, which feared that manga — including illustrated depictions of naked or nearly naked prepubescent girls, sometimes engaged in explicit sexual acts — would be included in the ban. The popularity of manga comics has mitigated the decline of a publishing industry hit hard by falling sales because of competition from the Internet.

Political leaders explain the exemption for manga by saying the depictions are imaginary and do not victimize actual children. They also said they opposed curtailing artistic expression.

“While there are concerns that such illustrations might encourage the viewing of children as sexual objects, freedom of expression is also an important issue,” the top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said Wednesday.

However, there has also been growing frustration at the central government’s refusal to pass a more sweeping ban. Three years ago, the city of Tokyo imposed its own prohibition on the sale of sexually suggestive material involving children, which the city’s governor at the time, Shintaro Ishihara, said encouraged pedophilia. But even that ban did not include less well-defined areas, such as the popular genre of “junior idols,” often 12- and 13-year-old girls who are photographed in sexually suggestive poses for magazines.

While some questions remain about what will actually be deemed pornographic under the law, lawmakers said the aim was to ban sexually explicit photographs and videos showing actual children. Possession of such materials will be punished with a prison term of up to one year, and a fine of up to about $10,000.

The new law, which is expected to go into effect next month, will give violators a one-year grace period to get rid of pornographic images before they will be prosecuted.

Speaking in Parliament, the justice minister, Sadakazu Tanigaki, said he hoped the new law would spur a broader change in social attitudes by sending a clear signal that it is no longer acceptable to objectify children.

“We must fight against a tendency of looking at children as sexual objects, and allowing them to be taken advantage of, sexually and commercially,” he told the upper house on Tuesday, a day before it voted the bill into law. The lower house had passed the bill earlier in the month.